Branding is incomplete without social media. Today, since social media has billions of users, it is necessary for every brand to have a presence there. To reach the audience of social media, brands need a page or profile where their audience can connect with them and get up to date with the latest happenings. For this, brands need to regularly put out content that will keep their audience engaged and up to date.
According to various statistics, the content that performs best on social media is mostly visual content. Visual content, like images and videos, has more engagement on them than regular text content. This is why it is important to create visual content for the social media platform.
Visual Content
When it comes to visual content, you need to follow the brand guidelines for consistency and social media design guidelines for the optimum result of visual content. Every social media platform has their own design guidelines that have mostly to do with the dimensions or aspect ratio of an image or a video. Here are the latest 2018 design size guidelines for Instagram, one of the most popular social media platform.
Image Orientations
Instagram allows three types of image orientations. These are:
- Portrait
- Landscape
- Square
These three types of orientations give flexibility to brands in creating content and diversity for designers in showcasing their creativity. Each orientation has a different size and aspect ratio guidelines for images and videos.
Landscape and Portrait
Portrait images are vertical rectangle-shaped images. The recommended size for portrait images is 1080 x 1350 px with an aspect ratio of 4:5. If the image has a width less than the recommended size, Instagram will enlarge it and it might look pixelated. If the image is bigger than the recommended size, then Instagram will crop it. For landscape or horizontal images, the recommended size is 1080 x 566 px with an aspect ratio of 1.91:1.
Square
Square images are pretty simple. The recommended image size is 1080 x 1080 px with an aspect ratio of 1:1. If the image is bigger than the recommended size, then Instagram will resize it.
Stories
Stories are images or videos that users can show on their profile for 24 hours. These are like featured content. The Stories in Instagram are displayed in portrait shape only. However, the design size guideline is not the same as the Portrait images mentioned above. Instead, it is recommended to post images with a size of 1080 x 1920 px with an aspect ratio of 9:16.